Clarilis Bags £6m in Series B Funding – as Legal Tech Investment Continues

Document automation company, Clarilis, has received £6m ($7.86m) in new funding – further proof that investment into legal tech companies is continuing, especially for those businesses that have already begun to scale.

The company, which uses a mix of tech and legal specialists to build and automate complex documents for a range of leading law firms, including Baker McKenzie, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Slaughter and May, said their series B funding had taken a little longer than anticipated because of COVID-19, but they were now very excited at having completed this significant funding round.

Henry Alty, Investment Director at Gresham House, which is one of the key investors, is joining the board of the UK-based company

The investment will be used to grow the sales and marketing functions of the company, but the majority of the cash will go into product development and enhancement.

International growth will be a key goal. The plan is to also significantly increase the size of the development team – which is another positive sign in the shape of a legal tech company hiring in many more people.

Overall, and as seen with several other companies that have matured and begun to scale, investors are looking long-term and seeing a future of growth beyond the immediate challenges caused by the crisis.

In terms of the investment, it saw cash come in from Mercia Asset Management / Northern VCTs, an existing investor, and Gresham House Ventures investing on behalf of the Baronsmead VCTs. In 2018, the company received around £3m in funding.

In May this year Clarilis joined the PwC Scale-Up programme, a step that no doubt was useful when it came to planning out its next growth stage.

While in January the doc automation company also launched an office in Singapore, with the goal of expanding its client base into the Asia-Pacific market.

And in 2019 they formed a re-seller partnership with UK law firm TLT. In short, they’ve been very busy the last couple of years and with this new investment, look set to grow now even faster.

As you can see in the graphic, Clarilis provides a PSL / managed service capability to help design and create the automated documents.

Clarilis was co-founded in 2015 by brothers James Quinn (pictured above), a former solicitor, and Kevin Quinn, the technical architect of the platform.

CEO, James Quinn, said: ‘It’s fantastic to have the continued support from the investment team at Mercia Asset Management and I’m really pleased they’re backing us again. We are also delighted that Gresham House has chosen to invest.

‘Gresham House were the clear choice here given Henry Alty and James Hendry’s in-depth knowledge of the legal tech space and excellent insight.  The Gresham House team also share our vision for the development of the Clarilis platform going forward.’

Commenting on the investment, Alty added: ‘We have spent a long time looking at automation within professional and financial services. While the legal world has arguably been a late adopter of technology, firms are realising that automation is essential to driving both cost efficiency and resilience across distributed workforces.

‘We’ve been impressed by the impact that Clarilis has already had in the market and as the business expands, particularly into the South East Asian market, we are excited to be bringing our experience to bear and to help facilitate its growth.’

Other named clients of Clarilis include: Addleshaw Goddard, GoCompare, Gowling WLG, National Grid, TLT and Travers Smith.